Technology

VOIP Update

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I have given up with the Cisco 7940 phone. I went out and bought a Motorola 5.8GHZ cordless phone. I will plug it into the ATA adapter (the device that actually turns a VOIP call into something an analog phone can understand) that Broad Voice sends me on Monday.

On another VOIP note I still need to configure the linksys VPN router I got so I can see if I can establish a static tunnel to the office. If I can do that I can get a Cisco phone to work with my office extension.

Also got the approval to purchase the network gear for our ongoing build out of our call center. I have to get the paper work together and get the integrator to order the switch. Looks like we will go with a Cisco Catalyst 4000 series switch. I am also getting some more product details on some other projects we are looking at from our Cisco engineer on Monday.

My New VOIP (Home) Phone

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I finally broke down and purchased another VOIP phone for my house. If you are someone who actually reads this regularly you will know last summer I got Vonage for about 2 weeks. it was too expensive for me to justify keeping it so I got rid of it. I am not home enough to warrant a home phone. I have been fine with my mobile.

Fast forward 14 months and I found a company that offers relatively cheap VOIP and offers all the cool features I wanted. Jayson found Broad Voice. They offer a $9.99 plan that gives you unlimited in state calls. That is all I needed so I got it. They also offer a function that AT&T Callvantage offers that allows me to have my phone right simultaneously on several phones. Now I can have my home phone ring at work, on my cell, etc at the same time. I have wanted one number to route to multiple lines for years. I used to use AT&T’s 500 number service back in the early 90’s but that was expensive and you paid per inbound calls. This is better. Whatever phone I pick up first is the phone that the call gets routed to.

What is also cool is that this company unlike allot of other VOIP providers allow you the option of bringing your own VOIP device or ATA adapter. What that means for me is if want I can configure a Cisco 7940 phone I have at work and use that with this service. I actually have been trying to do that today, but I am running into issues since our Cisco phones are configured for Skinny (to work with a Cisco Call Manager) and for this service I need SIP. No matter what Cisco says it is not simple to change the configuration. For now I am just routing all my calls to my mobile. I get 30 days to try it out, and it is only like $15 a month after tax’s and extra features. Not bad for unlimited local calls. I can use my mobile for long distance!

More reviews as I get it. Jayson and Gus are both waiting to see how I like this company, but they are both interested in the service.

PodCasting???

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I am feeling like crap today. That means I don’t have strength to do much more than sit around on my laptop and browse the web. Several blog’s that I read have been mentioning PodCasting. This link describes it best. I just downloaded iPodderX Podcast Client.

Since I don’t listen to audio books (yet), and I haven’t listened to the radio regularly in years I am not sure if this is for me. I am going to check it out though. Most suggestions from the blogs I read are usually pretty good. I will let you know if I like it. Or you might not care either way, and that is cool also..

Rumor New Treo’s Oct. 25

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I have read on many tech sites that the new Treo will be out in late October. I am saving up to get it once it is out for T-Mobile. If the last Treo release is any indication of how long I will have to wait for T-Mobile to release the Treo, I have until March to wait for it. Lets hope PalmOne buying handspring has fixed the REALLY long wait times for the phone to be released.

Several people in my office have the Treo 600’s and a few of us already plan on upgrading when the new one comes out. Jayson on the other hand is hoping to pick one of our 600’s up on the cheap when we upgrade.

My New Favorite Browser

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I have mentioned before I am no longer a fan of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Maybe it is the features it doesn’t have. Maybe it is the fact that MSFT decided to stop making a Mac version of the browser. Maybe it is just because it is a Microsoft product that someone has created a comparable product. I have been known to use alternate products to a Microsoft product if it is (to me) as good, just to say Microsoft I love your stuff but you should not be making everything under the sun.

I have been a fan of IE since version 4.0, but I think it’s time has past. Over the past 2 years I have seen myself using Mozilla almost exclusively. Some products and websites require IE so I still use it, but only when I have to.

The people who make Mozilla have come out with a new browser. it is their next generation browser. What they did was separate the browser from the mail / newsgroup client and created 2 products. The web browser is Firefox. It hasn’t exactly gone gold. Gold in software terms is the final version of a product. They have a new version out, and called it 1.0PR (preview release). So it is kind of / sort of the final version but not really. For me it was enough to download on my Mac. I have been using it since a day or so after it came out. So far I like it as much or better than Mozilla. I only installed it on my main Windows PC tonight. It is very similar to Mozilla, but I have noticed it loads allot faster. I think I may have found my new favorite browser.

I will put aside my disapproval of the naming convention of the browser since I like it so much. If it is not the final version then don’t call it version 1.0. Just keep it in beta. I am not a fan of software company’s using wide spread releases of software as their final beta’s or “preview releases”. I guess I am just one of the million’s of guinea pigs for Mozilla.org. At least the software works, and it is not painful being in a lab experiment…

Classic VMWare

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I have babbled on about VMWare for the past 2 days. I know, I have. Well I will probibly continue to do so for the forseable future. Why? Because that software is so cool. But in the short term I will stop my raving. I have finished installing Windows 3.11 for workgroups, Windows 95, 98, & ME in virtual machines. All I really need to create is a Windows 98SE vmware. Probibly no real reason to do it, but I will probibly do it anyway.

All the virtual machines work great. The only one with an issue is Win 3.11. I am not sure if the network card is properly configured. Since it didn’t come with an option to install a TCP/IP stack I will need to find that somewhere and give the network on that VM a try. it came with Netbeu, and IPX, but no TCP/IP.

Now that all that work is done I need to offload the virtual machines off my laptop since I only have 2 gigs of space left on it now.

This entry was written while listening to 100 Years from the album The Battle For Everything by Five for Fighting

Really Old School Virtual Machines

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After getting Win 98, and 95 installed I gave a crack at Windows 3.11. First off OS’s built when the 386 or 486 were common install on a P-4 with 750megs of ram (even if it is in a virtual machine) rather fast. I got DOS 6.22 installed in the Virtual Machine in 5 minutes. It took longer to get the virtual disk to be formated with FAT16 and the install files onto the disk than it did to run the install. Windows 3.11, actually Windows for Workgroups 3.11 took like 15 minutes total to install. Probably less. I didn’t test the network settings, but I was glad that the thing installed. I have saved all the configurations. I have no real use for them, except for having them and making sure they actually work. You never know when you will need and old OS.

It turns out the problems I had installing all of the above mentioned OS’s was not me, but my AMD Atholon 1500+ desktop. Some piece of hardware is crashing windows, and vmware. it was doing similar things a few months ago when I was trying to install win95. Now I think it is the machine. When it happened before I thought it was what I was trying to do. I got everything to work just fine on my Thinkpad T40.

Old School Virtual Machines

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I am in the process of installing into VMWare Workstation 4.0. Win 98 went ok, so I am working my way backward now. I am building up to trying Windows 3.1. I got the install files for 3.1 off MSDN a few years ago but haven’t been able to get it to install. I am on a role so far with older OS’s, so maybe I will get 3.1 to install ok. I need to track down an old version of DOS 6.x or 5.x also.

I wanted to get an original Windows 95 install, but the only legal disk I have of original windows 95 is an upgrade. So I am sticking to the Windows 95b flavor since I have a ton of licenses for it that I have not used in nearly 8 years.

I can safely say that Windows 95 takes less than 30 minutes to install on a new computer. I was surprised how quick the install took.

What does suck is having an OS (Windows 95) that doesn’t support network devices out of the box. It was easier today to install a newtwork driver on 95 than I remember it. But it was still a pain in the ass. From what I have dealt with on 95, I am not 100% sure I will want to get Win 3.1 up and running.

Windows 98 Basic

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Did you know you can’t even access windows update with the out of the box install of Windows 98? I am downloading the latest IE that you can get. Hopefully I can patch this thing up to make it almost usable.

Not sure what I am going to do when I install Windows 95 and it doesn’t even have IE 4 on it. I think it comes with IE 2.0, but that browser sucked even then. Who knows if I will even be able to get something newer installed. All this classic OS installing brings me back. Not getting that many good memories about dealing with this OS. I am so glad I am writing this from my Mac running OS 10.3 you can’t imagine. To think I was actually excited when Windows 98 first came out. I guess it was “good” back then, but look at what we have now, it was a joke. To be honest by the time 98 came out I was using Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. The only problem was almost no hardware peripherals worked with it, so I would always duel boot with the latest 9x flavor until Windows 2000 came out.

Windows 98 As a VMWare Virtual Machine

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I solved my boot disk issue that stopped me from installing Windows 98 into VMWare. A few months back I tried to put Win 95, and Win 98 into Virtual Machines using EMC’s VMWare. I had to play around with the boot options but I finally got one of my old Windows 98 CD’s to work. I took me a while to find what key code worked with the CD I had decided to use, but everything looks ok now.

Once this is build I plan on taking on Windows 95, and Windows 98 Second Edition. I want a basic Virtual Machine image of all the windows OS’s. You never know they will come in handy. I already used a Windows NT 4 Workstation image I made at work for troubleshooting a problem we were having.

On another Virtual Machine note I convinced Gus to evaluate the cost benefit of having a VMWare server (probably GSX Server) instead of buying hardware for some of the more obscure QA tests we run. It fits into our plan to emulate our production environment as much as possible, but why would we buy hardware for an ftp server in QA if we only use it once every few weeks. If we just built a virtual machine and used it when necessary we could save a bunch on hardware.